Free The Invisible Mountain by Carolina de Robertis

breasts. Bajo, to his delight, beat Pietro several times at cards.
After the last person had left, Pajarita still felt the loud, tender breath of guests. It curled around her as she lay in bed, cradling Bruno, listening to her husband turn off the kitchen light, enter the room, and sink down beside her. He lay completely still. She touched his shoulder.
    “What are you thinking about?”
    “Being a father.”
    She stroked his skin. “Are you happy?”
    He didn’t answer. He turned away. She stared at the outline of his back.
    “Ignazio?”
    No answer.
    She lay still for a minute, then another. Bruno squirmed and began to whimper. She raised her nightgown and placed him on her breast. Lay silent in the dark while he ate.
    That night Ignazio dreamed he swam underwater, in a Venetian canal, looking for the body of a woman. His father’s corpse, blue and engorged, floated toward him. Rotting arms pushed forward to enfold his body. He tried to scream, tried to resist, but when he opened his mouth it filled with putrid water.
    A prison arose in Punta Carretas. Right there, across from Carnicería Descalzo, the crank and haul of strange machines brought it into being. A vast wall formed, with an arching gate at its center, and behind the gate a huge box of a building was taking shape. It was imposing, castlelike, the most majestic structure Punta Carretas had ever known.
    “At least it’s pretty,” Sarita said, leaning on the sausage counter.
    “But it’s a prison,” Coco said. “It blocks our view of the lighthouse. And what kind of neighbors will we have?”
    “There’s no stopping it.” La Viuda spread her hands in a gesture of doom. “The whole
barrio
is changing. Punta Carretas is pure city now.”
    This was true. The stone and density of downtown was creeping into Punta Carretas. The city had claimed the
barrio
. Pajarita’s door no longer opened to a vague dirt path, but onto hard stone sidewalk. By the time she gave birth to Marco (a solemn baby, compared to Brunito’s restless roving), Punta Carretas had changed beyond recognition. Houses thronged to either side of them, pushing wall right up to wall; cobbles filled a street outside their door; a church took shape beside the rising prison. The air thickened. The lighthouse stopped reaching its slow beam into her home. And all of this, the mayor said, the president said, was progress; the city was larger, modernized, developed, Montevideo a worthy capital for this nation, the Switzerland of South America, full of hope and promise.
Amazing, Pajarita thought, how much the world could change. How accustomed she could grow to electricity, high stove, high chairs, high bed. How land could disappear beneath homes and rock-hard paving, and how men could turn into husbands who then turned into—what? What was Ignazio becoming? Someone different from the
joven
she met years ago; a man she sometimes barely recognized. It began with the birth of their first son and deepened with the second. Something inside him—pale and pained—had swollen to unmanageable size. It bulged. It never showed its naked face. It sank into the sea of all the liquor he drank. It kept him far away from her: in an era of eight-hour workdays, Ignazio came home later and later, drunk, face drawn tight like reins on an unpredictable horse—or, other nights, face loud, loose, unfettered. I don’t deserve you. You don’t love me. How could you. Why wouldn’t you. Did you did you yes you did. She tried to answer but there weren’t enough words and he never really posed a question. He grew obsessed with the idea that she had a lover. They fought over this phantom man’s existence. There were nights when they fought until they collapsed against each other, and only in those hours could she reach for who she was and who he longed to be and open them toward each other, strain to fuse them in a crucible of heat. On other nights she woke to feel Ignazio rustling into place beside her and he